Let’s Not Do Climate Policy Like Johnny Cash

The first day I got me a fuel pump
And the next day I got me an engine and a trunk
Then I got me a transmission and all of the chrome
The little things I could get in my big lunchbox
Like nuts, an’ bolts, and all four shocks
But the big stuff we snuck out in my buddy’s mobile home.

Johnny Cash, One Piece At A TIme

Ryan Avent at the Economist argues with Matt Steinglass, also at the Economist, about whether “leave it in the ground” is a desirable way to reduce global warming. Here is Avent:

In the end, reduction of fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions is all about the demand side—the supply of fossil fuels on earth is more than sufficient to turn the planet into an oven, and so demand must be rationed. So either you commit yourself to disrupting enough of currently available fossil fuel supply to raise fossil fuel prices, or you quit worrying about supplies and focus on demand-side measures. The former seems to me to be utterly impossible and not that economically desirable, and so I’d urge my colleague to concentrate on the latter…

This debate plays out all over the place: do you support a marginal policy that would reduce global warming by some small amount, or instead focus on promoting the much more efficient carbon tax and forgo these piecemeal policies? I understand why this debate goes on, and I can understand why cynics who are skeptical that we will get a carbon tax would promote piecemeal policies, although I disagree with them.

What I don’t understand is why all libertarians and conservatives don’t recognize that given the public perception on the issue, this is our choice set: we’re either going to do it like Johnny Cash -sloppily, inefficiently, and, one piece at a time-, or we can do it all at once as efficiently as possible. As long as pollution is perceived as being underpriced there will be a large, economically justified demand for piecemeal attempts to reduce it. Why not support the efficient approach and remove the economic case for these inefficient piecemeal policies?

That’s purely symbolic-belief territory there, too — I can’t imagine the scenario looks any better when you start to talk about energy taxes (direct or indirect).

I have a lot of “I don’t know” ground on climate change, but the one thing I think I am pretty sure of is that the Democrats have spent themselves on health care and aren’t interested in anything vaguely controversial.

I think you are right that the odds of a carbon tax or carbon auction aren’t great right now, but we do get policy action every single week. This is the piecemeal stuff I’m talking about; there’s not a week that goes by that some state, local, or federal government doesn’t enact some inefficient policy in the name of preventing global warming.

Of course, the policy action to take would be to undo the policy action that caused global warming in the first place.

The trick is to figure out what policy action caused the glaciers covering half the globe to melt.
It should be easy to do since there were so few governments during the Ice Age, thus there should be relatively few policy actions to review.

From that short list, it should be a simple step to identifying the faulty policy.
I’m thinking that, based on the advanced level of the then-current societies, the errant policy would be something like, “cook food” or “don’t freeze.”

Thus, once the pesky faulty policy is identified, it would simply be reversed by the opposite, namely, “don’t cook food” or “freeze.”